Twenty-Four Bits-Per-Pixel Format

Twenty-Four bits-per-pixel format is a true-color format, in which each pixel stores eight bits for red, green, and blue. There are advantages and drawbacks to this format. The advantages are that image quality is very good, and because each pixel occupies exactly 3 bytes, they can be packed together without wasting memory. The drawback is that since half the pixels in this scheme cross dword boundaries, there is a performance penalty in accessing and decoding pixels. Memory for this format can be arranged like this: